Pages

▼

Thursday, March 25, 2021

03/25 Links Pt2: Why Israel’s ‘Critics’ Can’t Help Being Antisemitic, and How They Can Stop; NGOs ask court to force Israel to provide vaccines for all Palestinians

From Ian:

Why Israel’s ‘Critics’ Can’t Help Being Antisemitic, and How They Can Stop
The problem that all anti-Israel liberals and progressives must face, however, is that Palestinian nationalism is not and has never been liberal or progressive. It has always been a racist movement that fundamentally dehumanizes the Jews. From the 1920s on, it has employed the pogrom and the slaughter of men, women, and children by knife, gun, and suicide bomber in order to achieve its aims. It glorifies war crimes and atrocities. It openly and enthusiastically collaborated with Nazism, to the point of encouraging and approving of the Holocaust. It spawned the PLO and Hamas, two of the most effective terror groups in history, both of which advocate ethnic cleansing. And it regularly engages in a crude antisemitism that is difficult if not impossible to distinguish from the right-wing antisemitism the left supposedly despises.

The Palestinian national movement, in other words, violates and has always violated liberal and progressive values, something that many leftists, however much they may advocate an end to the occupation and a Palestinian state, have always noted and thus opposed — which is much to their credit.

It presents the anti-Israel left, however, with a terrible dilemma: how can they support a movement that is contrary to all their professed principles?

The answer is a simple one: by embracing antisemitism. They have no other choice. They need to declare that Israel, Zionism, and the Jews are so evil that nothing is off limits. It is not so much that anti-Israel leftists are antisemitic, but that there is no way they cannot be antisemitic. There is simply no other way they can rationalize their adoption of Palestinian nationalism. Without antisemitism, they would be instantly revealed as hypocrites, racists, and genocidaires.

If anti-Israel antisemitism is to be overcome, then, anti-Israel leftists must at long last confront it within themselves. They must admit that it is perfectly possible to advocate a two-state solution or Palestinian self-determination without embracing a specific reactionary nationalism that rejects their most passionately held convictions.

Ironically, the best way for them to do so is by adopting the IHRA definition, which might prompt a moral struggle that could purge the left of the moral bankruptcy that has made criticism of Israel a racist endeavor.


Modified Definition of Anti-Semitism Sets a Dangerous Precedent
A new working definition of anti-Semitism unveiled last week by the Nexus Task Force is meant to challenge the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition as it relates to criticism of Israel. Nexus concludes that treating Israel differently than other countries is not in itself an act of anti-Semitism.

Before IHRA and before Nexus, the U.S. State Department's Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism released in 2010 its own working definition of anti-Semitism. What was conceptualized in 2003 by famed Israeli refusenik Natan Sharansky - demonizing, delegitimizing and holding Israel to a double standard - is defined as anti-Semitic.

Holding Israel - and only Israel - to a higher moral, behavioral and political standard not required by any other nation is plain wrong. Why is it OK for the only Jewish country to be disproportionally singled out and vilified for its actions? How is it not anti-Semitic to tell Jews to act differently than any other peoples because the world is watching their every move? History has taught us that giving others the authority to tell Jews how to think and behave has never ended well. The Nexus definition sets a dangerous precedent.




The Real Reasons That Evangelicals Support Israel
As Jews prepare for Passover and Christians prepare for Easter, it’s a good time to explain why Evangelicals support Israel.

Actually, it’s quite simple: we are grateful for the Jewish people because of our shared values. Evangelicals take the Bible seriously, and because of Israel’s stewardship of the Holy Land, we can safely visit and pray at the places we have learned about from the time we were children.

When we do visit, we arrive in a democracy like our own, and in a country whose innovations are making the world a better place in a thousand different ways.

Despite our ties to the land of Israel and its Jewish citizens, some mischaracterize Evangelical support for Israel for political reasons.

Here are the actual facts:

Christian support is not about the Apocalypse. The argument goes something like this, “Christians actually only want Jews in the Holy Land because Jesus can’t come back until they’re there.”

The truth is that all religions have their speculative debates about the end of the world. However, the Christian New Testament also warns “not to speculate about the time and hour of the Lord’s return.”

I know many scholars who study what theologians call “eschatology,” and all of them are ardent Christian Zionists who only want the best for their Jewish brothers and sisters. The job of a theologian is to piece together meaning from the words of the text in the same way that an archeologist pieces together a story from artifacts. The apocalyptic critique of Christian Zionism is just dishonest.

Christian support for Israel is also not about proselytization. There are those who confuse inexcusable efforts at proselytization with the Christian responsibility to be a witness.
Did a Documentary Skewering Evangelical Support for Israel Manipulate a Presidential Speech?
On March 29, the second day of Passover and the first Monday of Holy Week for many Christians, PBS stations throughout the United States will showcase a well-received documentary produced and directed by Israeli filmmaker Maya Zinshtein.

The documentary clearly appears to include a false quote attributed to former President Donald Trump. The right thing for PBS to do would be, at the very least, to postpone the documentary, insist on the removal of the quote, and vet the rest of the film to make sure it does not include any other fabrications.

But will PBS do the right thing? The film skewers Israel, settlers in the West Bank, and Evangelical Protestants in the US — popular targets for the documentary’s supporters.

The film is titled “‘Til Kingdcom Come.” It’s a purported exposé about what Zinshtein has called an “unholy alliance” between Evangelical Christians in the United States and Jews living in the West Bank, AKA, “settlers.” By Zinshtein’s account, Evangelicals in the United States support Israel because of their commitment to dangerous end-time scenarios. As an Israeli, Zinshtein is bothered by these scenarios, and does not want her brother serving in the IDF fighting on behalf of people who believe in these scenarios.

Zinshtein also believes that, acting in part to appeal to Evangelicals, the White House enacted dangerous policies such as moving the US embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, and by promoting an Israeli takeover of the West Bank. As it turns out, the embassy move was not the cataclysmic event that Palestinians and the anti-Israel press said it would be.
Israeli Health Minister: More Than Half the Population Fully Vaccinated
More than half of Israel’s citizens have now been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said on Thursday.

“We have crossed the 50 percent threshold of all Israeli citizens who are vaccinated in the second dose. Thanks to you [the public], the State of Israel is defeating the coronavirus. All that remains is to follow [Health Ministry] directives so that it doesn’t return,” said Edelstein, referring to the effect of the country’s aggressive inoculation campaign.

COVID-19 morbidity on Wednesday stood at 1.1 percent, down from a high of more than 10 percent, while the virus’s reproduction rate had fallen to 0.59. The downward trend has continued, despite Israel’s gradual exit from its third nationwide lockdown, which began on Dec. 27.

As of Thursday, 4,655,955 Israelis had received both doses of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to Health Ministry data.
Unvaccinated comprise 75% of COVID hospitalizations
According to Health Ministry data, 470 of the 45,007 Israelis that tested for COVID-19, Wednesday, were found to be carrying the coronavirus, for an infection rate of 1.1%.

Israel's reproduction rate has decreased 50% over the last month and now stands at 0.55, according to the data released Thursday.

There are currently 12,906 cases of the virus. There are 740 people hospitalized with the virus, 482 of whom are in serious condition. Of those in serious condition, 189 are on ventilators.

According to the Health Ministry, 75% of those hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated.

Twenty-one of those hospitalized are children, five of whom are in serious condition. There are also 16 pregnant women hospitalized, nine of whom are in serious condition.

Although 811,452 Israelis have recovered from the virus, 6,157 have died.
NGOs ask court to force Israel to provide vaccines for all Palestinians
Six left-wing NGOs have petitioned the High Court of Justice to force Israel to provide enough vaccines to the Palestinian Authority to inoculate its entire population.

“Evidently, the Palestinian Authority has an insufficient number of vaccines, whereas in what is practically the same area, the population of Israeli citizens and residents is almost fully vaccinated, apart from those who decline it,” the NGOs stated in the petition submitted on Thursday by attorney Adi Lustigman.

Those signed onto the petition were Physicians for Human Rights Israel; HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual; Al Mezan Center for Human Rights; Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement; Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel; and Rabbis for Human Rights.

At issue has been Israel’s decision early in the process to inoculate its own population first with those vaccines that have arrived, and only then to provide vaccines to the Palestinians, once vaccines on order have been received.

Israel does not have a legal obligation to vaccinate the Palestinians, having transferred responsibility to the Palestinian Authority under the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords.
Polish Catholic University Professor Who Endorsed Violently Antisemitic ‘Blood Libel’ Exonerated by Disciplinary Committee
A professor at Poland’s leading Catholic university has been spared from disciplinary action and exonerated for a lecture he delivered in 2018 in which he claimed that Polish Jews had engaged in ritual murder — one of the deadliest antisemitic falsehoods to have persisted over the centuries.

Fr. Tadeusz Guz, a professor of philosophy at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), endorsed the “blood libel” during a May 26, 2018 public lecture in Warsaw, in which he falsely alleged that Jews in Poland had engaged in the slaughter of Christian children for ritual purposes.

“We know, dear people, that the facts of ritual murder cannot be erased from history,” Guz told his audience. “Why? Because we, the Polish state, in our archives, in the surviving documents, have had over the centuries — when Jews lived together with our Polish nation — we have legally valid sentences for ritual murders.”

After a complaint was filed by the Polish Council of Christians and Jews, both the Archdiocese of Lublin and the academic authorities at KUL distanced themselves from Guz, but notably refrained from taking further measures against him. “The lecture activities of Fr. Guza outside the university are undertaken and carried out by him on his own responsibility, and the theses he proclaimed are not the position of his superiors,” a joint statement from the two institutions proclaimed at the time.
University of Illinois creates Jewish council to fight antisemitism
The University of Illinois has created a new Jewish advisory council in order to combat antisemitism and build an inclusive campus environment for Jewish students at the university, as reported by the student newspaper The Daily Ilini on Monday.

The council was announced by Chancellor Robert Jones on March 12, and came following complaints from students regarding antisemitic incidences on campus.

“This is a step forward, a good step forward, in solving the problem of dealing with antisemitism on campus,” Erez Cohen, co-chairman of the council and executive director of Illinois Hillel, told The Daily Illini.

“We’ve seen that Jewish students, Jewish faculty and Jewish staff members were not consulted in these situations, and the response was much more general," he said. "So, having more involvement in helping solve our community’s problem is really critical.”

The new advisory council conducted its first meeting on Monday and is expected to meet at least another four times during the semester. As part of its meetings, the council will meet with Jones and Sean Garrick, vice chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, along with students to hear their personal stories of antisemitism on campus and their views on Jewish life in general.


Yisrael Medad: Yet Another Unpublished Letter-to-the-Editor
On March 17, 2021, the UK Guardian published an oped by Salem Barahmeh entitled, "The Israeli and Palestinian elections offend democracy – each in their own way".

I wrote a letter-to-the-editor and it was emailed the following day:
In his March 17 op-ed, Salem Barahmeh, of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, conveniently blames Israel for the lack of democracy in the Palestinian Authority. Israel has never prevented President Mahmoud Abbas, last elected 16 years ago, from initiating elections. The responsibility for the regime Abbas oversees which among other actions severely restricts the freedoms, liberties and rights of its population too numerous to list cannot be assigned to Israel. At some time in their history, the Arabs of Palestine must assume accountability for their own actions or lack thereof.

In bemoaning the fact that upwards of 700,000 Jewish Israelis are living in the territories claimed by the Palestinian Authority, Barahmeh ignores the pre-state period of 1920-1948, when thousands of Jews who were living in those same areas such as Jerusalem's Old City and its environs, Hebron, Gaza, Nablus, Etzion Bloc and other locations then called by the United Nations in its 1947 partition plan as Judea and Samaria, were removed due to both a campaign of terror promoted by the then Mufti Amin El-Husseini and the hostilities Arabs launched after rejecting that internationally supported compromise arrangement which the Jewish community of Mandate Palestine did accept. Had Jews not been targeted in an ethnic cleansing operation, just as twenty percent or more of Israel's current citizenry are Arab, there should be no reason 20% of Palestine's residents, if not citizens, could be Jewish.

Yisrael Medad

Shiloh, Israel

I waited a few days and I don't see it.

So now it's public here.


Is Natalie Portman from “Occupied Palestine?” HR Prompts IMDB Correction
Actress Natalie Portman is one of Holywood’s most recognizable stars. She has featured in some of the biggest hits of the last 25 years, playing roles such as Queen Padme Amidala in the Star Wars movies, Jane Foster in the Avengers superhero series of movies, and receiving multiple awards for her roles in Jackie and Black Swan.

Portman is also Israeli. But the website of the International Movie Database, a resource used by literally millions of users each day, instead listed her as being born in “Jerusalem, Palestine.”

Furthermore, the page described Portman’s family as having left “occupied Palestine” when Natalie was four-years-old, but in reality the land she left was internationally-recognized as Israel. The incendiary phrase “occupied Palestine” is as accurate as describing Texas as “occupied Mexico.”

IMDb is a website that runs on a model similar to that of Wikipedia. Both are powered by their readers, who are free to edit articles. While edits on Wikipedia can be instantaneous, though, edits to IMDb are submitted to IMDb’s “data editors” for checking.

As the IMDb site notes:
We often need to check your updates before we complete them. The time it takes us to do this can vary. Please see here for our current waiting times.

If your update doesn’t show up within the normal time-frame, this usually means that we have not been able to verify it or there is a problem with the submission; see this guide for more information.”
Reviewing BBC coverage of Israel’s election day
In comparison with previous Israeli elections in 2013, 2015, April 2019, September 2019 and 2020, BBC coverage of the March 23rd 2021 general election has been rather subdued.

Prior to election day itself, BBC News website audiences saw one report in December 2020 and one article by Tom Bateman on March 22nd, an audio version of which was aired on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme on the same day:

On the morning of March 23rd BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ listeners heard a short report by the BBC Jerusalem bureau’s Yolande Knell in a news bulletin (from 2:06:15 here).

Listeners to the afternoon edition of the BBC World Service programme ‘Newshour’ heard a report by the Jerusalem bureau’s Tom Bateman (from 14:05 here) from a polling station in Tel Aviv and a filmed report from the same location was apparently aired on BBC television.

Visitors to the BBC News website on the morning of March 23rd found a report headlined “Israel’s Netanyahu faces uphill battle as voters return to polls”. In relation to the Coronavirus pandemic, that article misleads readers with the inaccurate claim that:
“At its peak, Israel was one of the worst-hit countries in the world, but more than half the population has now received at least one vaccination dose.”
BBC’s Bateman goes south in superficial election report
On the morning of March 22nd visitors to the BBC News website’s ‘Middle East’ page found the first item relating to the following day’s general election to appear since December 2020.

That sub-heading and indeed the rest of Tom Bateman’s article titled “Israel election hopes and fears play out in crater town” fails to inform readers that in all of the five general elections held between January 2013 and March 2020 (see here, here, here, here and here), the Likud party secured the most votes in Mitzpe Ramon.

Bateman brings the voice of one resident who does not intend to vote Likud, together with some unevidenced framing concerning freedom and democracy:
Financial Times fails to correct error in op-ed by former Irish President
An op-ed by Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN Commissioner for Human Rights, and current chair of The Elders, was published at the Financial Times (“Palestinian peace must rest on international law”, March 15).

Robinson, as readers may recall, was the driving force, in her UN role, behind the Orwellian named “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” in 2001 – a cesspit of hate aptly described as an “intellectual pogrom against Jews and Israel”.

Her op-ed includes the following claim:
Under the Trump administration, respect for international law was superseded by unilateral and partisan policy shifts, including US alignment with Israel in its argument that the legal status of the occupied Palestinian territories is merely “disputed”.

That shift gave cover to the continuing construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — the biggest threat to the two-state solution and a flagrant violation of international law. It also helped justify the extension of Israeli domestic law to the 650,000 Jews living in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In our complaint to Financial Times editors, we noted that Israel, contrary to what Robinson wrote, did NOT extend Israeli law to communities in Judea and Samaria. Though the idea of extending Israeli sovereignty (referred to by the media as “annexation”) to a portion of the territories was being debated last year, the government agreed to halt those plans when the Abraham Accords were signed.
CAMERA Prompts NPR Correction Scrolls Found in Israel
After a segment on NPR’s Here and Now misplaced the location of a rare archeological find, CAMERA secured a correction from the program.

Both on-the-air and in print, Here and Now claimed that the Cave of Horror, in which new fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls were found earlier this year, is located in the West Bank.

After CAMERA corresponded with editors at WBUR, which produces the program with NPR, the story was updated and a correction was appended to the online story. The correction reads, “Correction: The Dead Sea Scroll fragments were found in Israel, not in the West Bank. We regret the error.”

NPR has yet to broadcast a correction on the air, for listeners who were misinformed while listening to Here and Now.
New Zealand Ski Resort Backs Away From Honoring Nazi SS Volunteer Following Protest From Jewish Community
A top ski resort in New Zealand has quietly backed away from plans to honor a former volunteer in the Nazi Waffen SS.

Willi Huber — an Austrian-born SS combatant who emigrated to New Zealand — was affectionately referred to in his adopted country as a “founding father” of the Mt. Hutt ski resort, which attracts thousands of visitors each year. After Huber died on Aug. 9, 2020 at the age of 97, the resort announced plans to name a ski run and a restaurant after him.

Last September, amid a petition campaign to oppose the resort’s move, members of the New Zealand Jewish Council and the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand discussed the honoring of Huber with Paul Anderson of NZSki, the company that operates Mt Hutt. The company stated that the decision to honor Huber would be reversed only if evidence of his World War II record was produced.

This week, Anderson suggested in a media interview that a map of the resort with references to Huber removed was the result of the company’s deliberations.

“We’ve had to take care on the way through to respect the views of a wide range of people and recognize that there were diverse opinions on the issue,” he told local news outlet Newsroom. “We’ve just come to our decision that it’s time to move forward.”

Huber first arrived in New Zealand in 1953 as an immigrant from Austria. A decade earlier, he was decorated with the Iron Cross for his service with the Waffen-SS during the Battle of Kursk in the Soviet Union — the largest tank battle in history that raged through the summer of 1943, resulting in a heavy defeat for the Nazis at the hands of the Soviet Red Army.


Israeli Company Turns South Africa's Water from Toxic to Drinkable
An Israeli company is assisting local government authorities to transform toxic water to healthy drinking water in what could be a game-changer for South Africa as a water-scarce country.

The company, BlueGreen Water Technologies, is a world leader in eradicating toxic algae from water sources, and has offered its expertise to South Africa.

With a branch in South Africa, the company started working at Setumo Dam on the Molopo River in North West province earlier this month. The project is in collaboration with Sedibeng Water, the company overseen by the Department of Water and Sanitation.

Speaking to the SA Jewish Report from Germany where he is currently based, BlueGreen Water Technologies Chief Executive Eyal Harel said, “Toxic algae blooms are like a ‘global pandemic’ of bacteria. They infest bodies of water, and when that population of bacteria explodes, it makes the water toxic. You can’t use that water for drinking or recreation, it depreciates property, it makes that body of water too hostile for other life forms, and it creates health and economic problems.”

The company believes in the value of all people having access to quality drinking water, Harel said, and it’s doing the work in South Africa on humanitarian grounds. “At the Setumo Dam, it’s more like lots of bacteria with a bit of water in between. But half a million people rely on it for drinking water. We came to help get good quality drinking water to these communities.” Local government departments and officials had been “extremely helpful … everyone is working together”, Harel said. “Even in this time of pandemic and reduced budgets, they are doing an excellent job.”

He said the condition of the dam meant it was impossible to treat it from the ground, so they have had to deploy helicopters to distribute product from the air. “This is the first operation of its kind in the world. It’s new for us too, and requires lots of co-ordination with government officials, water boards, and locals.”
Israeli, Slovak Defense Ministries Sign $175 Million Defense-Export Agreement
Israel and Slovakia on Thursday signed a first-of-its-kind, $175 million agreement for the procurement of 17 sophisticated radar systems for the Slovak Air Force, according to a statement by Israel’s Defense Ministry.

The agreement, which was signed in a festive ceremony at the Slovak Ministry of Defense in Bratislava, includes the transfer of technology and knowledge from Israel to Slovakia, as well as industrial cooperation. The radar components will be manufactured in collaboration with defense industries in Slovakia, under the professional guidance of Israel Aerospace Industries and Israel’s Defense Ministry.

The flagship Multi-Mission Radar (MMR), manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) subsidiary ELTA systems, “will provide the Slovak defense establishment with a complete aerial situational assessment,” according to the statement.

“The radar detects airborne threats, classifies them, calculates their threat level and provides essential data that enables systems to neutralize multiple threats simultaneously. In addition, these radar systems will be interoperable with NATO defense mechanisms,” said the statement.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz called the agreement a “significant milestone” in cooperation between the two countries’ defense ministries.

“The new agreement first and foremost provides Slovakia with high-quality, advanced systems to maintain their national security, while also strengthening defense industries and creating many new jobs in Israel and Slovakia,” said Gantz.
The Tikvah Podcast: Sean Clifford on the Israeli Company Making the Internet Safe for American Families
Today, everybody, children and adults alike, is glued to their smartphones and tablets and computers. But much of the content readily available on these devices can be harmful, especially for children. So helping children navigate the internet in healthy ways-insulating them from the worst excesses of pornography, sexting, and social pressure—is among the primary tasks of a parent today. But that’s no no easy task. How can parents and their children take advantage of all the boons the internet offers while ensuring it’s safe for family?

To explore this question, on this week’s podcast, Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver is joined by Sean Clifford, CEO of Canopy, an American offshoot of the Israeli company Netspark, which has developed a technology that filters websites and messages in real time to help parents curate the internet for their children. Netspark’s technology has been adopted by Israel’s ministry of education and is used in thousands of school computers there. Now, through Canopy, their technology has come to the American market, where it can be used to protect Muslim, Christian, and Jewish families all over the United States.


Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Finds New Names, Stories From Nazi Death Camp
Archivist Ewa Bazan at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum discovered new names and stories linked to the German Nazi concentration and death camp.

“We didn’t know what to expect when we started the project,” Bazan told AFP in a report published on Wednesday. The work of Bazan and her colleagues found 4,000 previously unknown identities and information about 26,000 others.

The identities of 300,000 prisoners out of 400,000 are known, according to the report.

Around 90 percent of the files were destroyed by camp guards before they fled. A recently completed two-year project with the Arolsen Archives of Germany revealed new information.

Krzysztof Antonczyk, head of the museum’s digital archive, told AFP that 905,000 other people, who were not prisoners, were brought there and murdered upon arrival without leaving any records.

“Their names sometimes appear only on transport documents that the Nazis were using,” he said.

The project has digitized 120,000 documents dealing with prisoners at Auschwitz. One new example is two Hungarian Jewish brothers, Jeno and Mor Hoffmann, who were transported from Auschwitz to Buchenwald and then back again to Auschwitz.

“Auschwitz is the world’s biggest cemetery without any tombs,” stated Antonczyk, according to the report.
‘A selfless act’: Strangers help honour Holocaust survivor, 75 years after his death
He lives 15,000 kilometres away in the United States, but David Nelson was so moved by the tragic story of a young Jewish man’s 1946 death in Melbourne that he organised a gravestone for him.

In soft rain on Sunday at Fawkner cemetery, in Melbourne’s north, 11 people attended the consecration of the monument to Kurt Kriszhaber, which is engraved with the Star of David.

Teacher and lay cantor Michael Cohen recited psalms, then said in English and sang in Hebrew the Memorial Prayer, asking God to grant Mr Kriszhaber “proper repose under the sheltering wings of your presence”.

Mr Nelson, who watched by live stream from Florida, has spent three years pursuing the recognition Mr Kriszhaber did not receive upon his death.

In 2018 Mr Nelson – an education assistant at the Holocaust Museum and Cohen Education Centre in the city of Naples, Florida – read a 1941 letter in his museum’s collection that Mr Kriszhaber wrote from an internment camp at Tatura, near Shepparton in central Victoria.

In the letter, addressed to New York woman Sally Faktor, a frantic Mr Kriszhaber, aged 20, asks Ms Faktor – believed to be a relative or friend – if she knows what has become of his relatives in his native Vienna, Austria.

Mr Nelson, a former journalist, “started digging around on the internet” and found Mr Kriszhaber’s father was murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.



at